Peace-2

by Zachery Brasier

part 1

The Moscow Metro is a logical system. Starting at the river and the Kremlin, the color-coded lines trace linear paths out into the sprawling city. A giant circular line — coloured brown — encompasses the inner districts, connecting to all the straight lines and allowing passengers to switch conveniently between each in no time at all. One can ride the circle and watch the interchanges shift color combinations at each stop: Brown-Blue, Brown-Red, Brown-Green, etc. Trains arrive within minutes of each other; turquoise, screeching, and efficient.

In the year 1986, the faces shuffling through the system wore worry and apprehension. The country was in trouble. The evidence of decay was everywhere, but it was so multivariate that forming a coherent analysis, much less a prognostication, remained impossible. Two short-lived premiers had ascended, then suffered untimely deaths.

Now came a new one: Gorbachev. A reformer, maybe. At least he called himself one. That February, he introduced new catchphrases to the vernacular: democratization, decentralization, transparency, and restructuring. By April, it was still unclear what any of that meant. There was hope, but talk of such massive reforms begged the question: How bad are things, really?

Among the worried faces was Vasily Dolgov, on his way home from the Academy of Sciences, having finished a day designing optical systems for a spaceship. He descended into the Metro at Leninsky Prospect, switched over to the circle under the marble of Oktyabrskaya, rode around for roughly one-hundred and twenty degrees, transferred over to the red line at Komsomolskaya, then up one stop to Sokolniki where he emerged into spring air blowing from the east. The seasonal thaw was in full swing, and a good portion of the neighborhood was out strolling through the city park that gave the station its name. Originally, the czarist princes had used the land for falcon hunts.

Vasily looked down at his watch and estimated he could spare a half hour before his wife came home. He decided to take some time to walk a park trail and remember what it meant to be human. Working on optics did that to a person; made them lose themselves within all the vector calculus.

As he walked into the park, he tried to forget about his spaceship: Polyus, a military weapon satellite. Instead, he thought about Mir. It was a new type of space station. Rather than launching the whole station at once, as they had done in the Salyut program, they were launching Mir in pieces and assembling it in orbit, allowing the station to grow much larger than if it were constrained by the launch capacity of a single rocket.

He got distracted by children playing in the central park circle, a flock of them stomping over the remnants of the winter ice sculptures, worn down by the thaw to misshapen nubs. They squealed as the ice cracked and popped under their feet, defeating the freeze in their own way.

Vasily was much like them, an ignorant child easily impressed. He was mesmerized when the military officers approached him with an exciting new project. They couldn’t tell him what it was, and that secretive mystique had captured him. Now he was stuck, and the project had turned out to be a nightmare.

Three years prior, Ronald Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan to fill space with a constellation of American weapon satellites, each capable of shooting down an ICBM in the boost phase. If it worked, geopolitics would be set back to 1945; the Americans would have the only viable nuclear weapon delivery system. His country had only one choice: an arms race.

At random, he took one of the avenues radiating from the park center. A group of young men were jogging in the opposite direction. Vasily stood to the right of the path and watched them pass, wondering how many of them would be dead in Afghanistan within a year. He shook his head and returned to his thoughts of Polyus.

It was the first Soviet move, a giant 100-ton satellite armed with lasers and cannons, designed to pick off the SDI satellites. Vasily, as an optical engineer, was attached to the targeting system development group. A small task in the grand scheme of things, but ever since late 1985 he had been tormented by the realization that in his own little way he was making the world worse. He was dedicating his hands, his skills, and his know-how to starting up the arms race again.

Vasily’s wandering connected him to a circular path that looped around the main part of the park. As he walked through the curving avenue of trees, he heard faint music ahead, aggressive guitars and a baritone voice. Finally, the path revealed the source: a couple kissing on a bench out in the warm air. The boyfriend looked over and saw him, stiffened, then quickly silenced his cassette player. The girl looked at the ground. Reflexes passed down from their grandparents.

They don’t need to do that for me, Vasily thought. But then, he was nearly twenty years older and attached to a military project. He kept walking and, once the couple was out of sight, he heard the music start up again.

He found himself thinking about the statistical estimates showing that the American system would most likely fail. An anti-ICBM constellation was simply too complex. Polyus was more straightforward. True, it was not as immediately capable, but having a laser on orbit would be a strategic advantage when, as they all assumed, the Brilliant Pebbles would eventually get canceled. Then the Soviets would have the only space weapon. This train of thought was making it harder for Vasily to consider his work to be strictly speaking “defensive.”

Back into the brambles, he took an avenue to return to the park center. He was locked in, there was no way he could get out, nobody he could talk to without raising suspicion about his allegiances. He couldn’t even confide in Yulia, his wife, for fear of violating military secrecy. Ten years in prison, probably more, if he so much as told her what the lenses he was grinding would be used for. All she knew was that he worked with spaceships.

The ice sculptures again. Glancing at his watch, Vasily realized that Yulia would probably be home by now. He exited the park and started making his way back home, walking down a long avenue bracketed by high-rise apartments. The complexes were taller and better than the khrushchyovkas of his youth, reaching twenty stories or more. Imposing to some, but to him they spoke of steady progress. Modern landforms. Residential canyons in concrete and glass.

Entering his building, he decided to climb the stairs. When he opened the thick metal door of his apartment, he heard Yulia clanking around in the kitchen. Their apartment wasn’t luxurious, but it was home. The walls were hidden behind large hanging rugs with kaleidoscope colors, solid wood furniture inherited from Yulia’s father, shelves holding textbooks from their college days: physics doorstoppers, Marxist tomes, poetry collections, naive revolutionary hagiographies.

“Welcome home,” Yulia called as she poked her head out of the kitchen and watched him undo his shoes. When he looked up and waved at her she grimaced, “You look exhausted, want a drink?” He nodded, and her head disappeared back around the corner.

“It’s my patriotic duty to inform you that Comrade Mikhail is very disappointed in this choice,” she called as bottle caps popped.

He followed her voice, wrapping his arms around her and easily encircling her willowy form. He buried his face into her dust-brown hair.

Holding the bottles, she twisted around in his embrace, snuggling against him. He claimed his bottle and mumbled, “Cutting down drinking. That’ll turn everything around.” He let Yulia go and asked, “How was your day?”

She worked as a clerk in a department store. Open only to the nomenklatura and their friends, it was a high-class establishment. Her job came with many perks, access to higher quality groceries being chief among them. “The girls are chattering away as always,” she started. “Everybody’s got their opinions about this restructuring business. You can hardly get people to talk about anything else. Oh, except that Galina came and visited with little baby Sasha Sergeievich. He has his daddy’s face.” She twisted her mouth into a comically exaggerated frown.

“So everything went smoothly?”

“As smoothly as you could expect. She was at a well-stocked hospital.”

She began rummaging through the cupboards to put together a meal, producing an array of cans, grains, and potatoes. They cooked and ate together, settling afterwards to their couch for shared cigarettes. Having fallen deep into thought, Yulia jumped when the phone rang. She let the energy carry her bouncing over to where it was attached to the wall.

“Hello? Hi, how are you? What?” Yulia furrowed her eyebrows and covered the receiver. “They’re playing classical music on Vremya," she whispered. Vasily got up and turned on the TV, catching the last triumphal chords of a symphony he didn’t recognize. “We have it on,” Yulia assured whoever was on the other side of the line. She hung up and took a seat next to Vasily.

The broadcast started, a nondescript woman reading in front of a solid blue background: “There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people. An investigative commission has been set up.” End.

Yulia turned to Vasily, stunned. “What does that mean?”

“They said it was an accident, but they wouldn’t need to inform Moscow if it was a localized incident like a construction mishap.” He thought about it. “I wonder if a reactor exploded.”

“How many people would that kill?”

“Probably not many right now,” he answered, staring straight ahead “They don’t blow up like a nuclear bomb. But if it’s leaking radioactive material, and the leak is bad enough, they have to tell us. I can’t possibly guess how that number will grow. Depends on a lot of factors...”

Yulia’s hands started shaking, her teasing jubilance melting to visible worry. Her question came out in a jumble. “What’s...what’s happening to our country?”

* * *

Summer came, a radioactive season. Every cough, pain, and momentary weakness implied radiation poisoning. Nobody knew how large the cloud was or how many people had been affected. The accident turned the country into a population of hypochondriacs.

Still, summer was in full swing. Emerald trees and deep blue skies, endless days and strolls through the city boulevards.

Vasily was unmoved by the cheery weather, weighed down by the thought of alpha particles entering his lungs and stifled by the pressure to finish Polyus’s targeting systems for delivery to Baikonur by the end of August.

On one of those long days he entered the Academy of Sciences and was immediately accosted by engineering lead Alexei Boyko. “They’ve denounced Aleksandrov and Slavsky.”

“What?”

“Just came in. Gorbachev is blaming them for Chernobyl. It sounds like he would like to blame the whole nuclear industry, but he went for the big shots instead.”

“And so? Are they being arrested?”

“Apparently not. It’s a new democratic age, after all.” Alexei shrugged, and Vasily wondered how far down the chain of command that mercy extended. “It’s very quiet over in the nuclear labs, though. I think they are mostly stunned. Anyways, get some tea. We need that brain of yours.”

Vasily nodded, and Alexei strolled away.

Indeed, they did need Vasily. The optical components were at the end of their design cycle. It was the horrible final moments of a project when, after all the work, they would finally see if every component interfaced correctly as a whole.

Entering his lab, Vasily was overwhelmed by four walls filled with optical equations. His teammates were already working, grinding through matrices, triple integrals, curls, divergences and gradients. A table sat covered in electrical components, the nearly-complete targeting system for the most advanced satellite the Soviet Union had ever designed.

Forgetting the nuclear shakeup, Vasily fell back into the looping ethical crisis of weapon design, a problem that was only getting worse. Secretly, he hoped something would fail, but he knew that was unlikely. As he began manipulating the abstract mathematical spaces on the blackboards, every successful calculation felt like a needle prick. When he punched the numbers into their computer terminal, it only felt like one more thing he had done to make the world worse. Did every engineer feel this way? he wondered. When had this philosophical spectre appeared?

He could just stop, or enter the numbers wrong. But no. He wasn’t particularly patriotic, but he also did not have the temperament of a reformer.

The day went on through the torture, and soon he was back in the Metro system, going in a different direction from his usual one. He was to meet Yulia for a walk around VDNKh, a park on the other side of the city from Sokolniki. The outing would give him more time to ruminate.

Somebody had to stop this. The country couldn’t handle another arms race, and nothing threatened humanity more than weapons in space. Now it was just satellites, but when in the history of warfare had humankind arbitrarily stopped at a given level of destructive capability? Ballistic missiles, space-based interceptors to knock out missiles, satellites to shoot down the interceptors, systems to shoot down those satellites... on and on until nuclear war broke out in space with spheres of EM radiation covering the globe, knocking out the electronic infrastructure of the modern age and setting human technological progress back generations in one fell swoop.

Was he the heroic somebody who could prevent that catastrophe? Did it have to be him? Was he one of those hinge points of history, a single person who, in one burst of bravery, could change the world?

Proceed to part 2...